Will "A Bug's Life" suffer by coming out so soon after "Antz"? Not any more than one thriller hurts the chances for the next one. There are sneaky throwaway lines (when Flik visits a city, he encounters a beggar who explains, "A kid pulled my wings off"). A circus trick involves matches and flypaper. A rainstorm feels like the colony is being water-bombed. Flea's Circus? The animators, led by director John Lasseter, provide rich images. How is he to know they aren't really warrior insects, but simply discontented performers from P. He finds nine, including a walking stick named Slim ( David Hyde Pierce), a praying mantis (Jonathan Harris), a caterpillar that looks military and sounds like a Nazi ( Joe Ranft), a black widow ( Bonnie Hunt) and others. Soil ( Roddy McDowall), and resolves to fight back.įlik uses a dandelion pod as a sort of aircraft and flies off on a hopeful quest to find mercenaries he can hire to defend the colony. What to do? Flik feels terrible because his clumsiness caused the trouble he apologizes to the Queen ( Phyllis Diller), is encouraged by Princess Atta ( Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Mr. Hopper has the kind of personality that makes him talk with his hands, and since he has four, Flik gets the message: Rebuild the Offering or face unspeakable consequences. Flik spills the Offering, and Hopper ( Kevin Spacey), the leader of the grasshoppers, is not pleased. ![]() ![]() But he's still basically just an ant the film is more about the fate of the colony and not so much about individuals like the Woody Allen hero of "Antz." There is a crisis. As the other ants labor to pile up "The Offering," a mountain of food for tyrannical grasshoppers, Flik perfects an invention to harvest grain more quickly he's the Cyrus McCormick of the hymenopterous Formicidae. The film's hero is Flik (voiced by Dave Foley), the smartest ant in the colony (the competition is not fierce). The story, about an ant colony that frees itself from slavery to grasshoppers, is similar in some ways to the autumn's other big animated release, " Antz," but it's aimed at a broader audience and lacks the in-jokes. But the Pixar computer animation studio, a Disney co-producer, broke new ground with " Toy Story" in 1995, and now with "A Bug's Life," it runs free. It's a formula that has produced wonderful movies.
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